Quote from: benjyz on April 28, 2014, 07:16:16 PM

If you are so interested in these kinds of things, you should study the problem first. You seem to overlook some basics of Bitcoin. The current stakeholders, i.e. ASIC owners, have no interest in giving up their money printing press. To make changes to Bitcoin you need the consensus of those who have mining power and developers ("community consensus"). That community consensus is very clear.

I am studying Satoshi's paper in order to extract the terms of the social contract. Then I will author a project whitepaper to describe Bitcoin Proof-of-Stake in an academic format suitable for review. What I have thought about so far assumes well-behaving and bug-free agents operating in an ideal network - abstracted from the real network used by Bitcoin today. The whitepaper must allow for misbehaving and buggy agents operating in a possibly broken network. The new system must be shown to work without any trusted agents. The more convincing math that is in the paper - the better. The developer consensus can be moved by logic and math.

Quote from: benjyz on April 28, 2014, 07:16:16 PM

Bitcoin will never move to PoS.

The year 2016 is the last year for awarding 1,314,000 block reward bitcoins, then the block reward halves for the subsequent four years. I would tentatively set January 1, 2016 as the project launch date, because the reallocation of the block rewards is the enticement for switching transactors and holders over to the new version. I will revise a small portion of the Bitcoin Core C++ source code, and create a reference pool Java software program before the end of 2014, and then use all of 2015 for public testing in a sandboxed Bitcoin testnet. At least one altcoin, e.g. bytecoin, could be forked by others to test proof-of-stake in the wild in 2015.

A controversy over the future of Bitcoin can only hurt its price and utility.

All further actions of this project must be non-confrontational to the maximum degree.